Interview of Donald H. Holmes
Transcript Number 085

September 26, 2001

This interview is being conducted at the University of North Carolina Wilmington on the 26th of September in the year 2001. I'm Paul Zarbock, part-time staff member here at the UNCW Library. Our interviewee today is Mr. Donald Holmes. I'm going to start off by asking Mr. Holmes how did you get into the military and what happened after that?

HOLMES: I went into the military when the government gave me a number and said go get on a train, went over to Fort Dix. They said you're going into antiaircraft, the 140th antiaircraft unit, 90 mm. We landed at Fort Bliss, trained for a year in the desert and they decided we're not going to have any rigs so we broke off, went to California, went to the same place from California into the infantry.

INTERVIEWER: The year is what, Donald?

HOLMES: This would be 1944, and trained in the infantry, went to New York, got on the Queen Elizabeth. We went over in style. The boat was so fast, it could outrun submarines. We stopped in Boston to pick up prisoners from the brig and a couple other places, lifetime hardened criminals from the service that were thrown in the jail. Three miles out, they were free to go and fight with us in the 89th Infantry. They said they were going to pay us to go kill people (laughter) and this is what they were in for. And they were the toughest guys I ever saw. "Show me the Germans", they were that kind of people.

So we stopped in England, went across on a little boat to LeHavre and they said rest up and we're going to enter France. So all night long, the guy and the captain were saying "Attencione, attencione" and then talked in French to the crew all night long. So we go into LeHavre and the first thing we noticed was a smell. On the corners over there, are public urinals for the men. Whew. About four foot tall, I guess it was a little fence around them. 

From there, we bivouacked on the regular train, had to get off the train, get on the Narrow Gauge Railroad, the same cars they used in World War I, 40 and 8. 

INTERVIEWER: How old a man were you in those days, Mr. Holmes?

HOLMES: Well by then I was 21.

INTERVIEWER: And since many people seeing this video tape don't know what 40 and 8 means, tell us what 40 and 8 means.

HOLMES: 48 was the World War car transport which had 40 men and 8 mules and we used the mules who would still smell for luggage and stuff and we'd get up to the front line and this officer was saying "Get the stuff of the train, we have to get going". He said, "That's my trunk, kick it off". So we kicked it off, it caught on the corner and split open (laughter). Anyway, so we get up to the French German border where the fighting had just gone through, a little town called Bitburg and there were no Bits, completely gone, this village where they went through with tanks and everything else.

INTERVIEWER: What time of the year was that, do you remember?

HOLMES: It was just before, probably fall, just before oh the name of that big battle?

INTERVIEWER: Battle of the Bulge?

HOLMES: Battle of the Bulge, that was our first, to go down and go north to the Battle of the Bulge, winter, snow and we started to go to the Battle of the Bulge. That's when it ended. They sent Patton, General Patton, which was the 89th Infantry, down to the south to cut off any retreat of these troops going down into Austria, Bavaria, into that area. So that was our first big battle was the Battle of Mozel, the Mozel River basin. It was pretty heavy. Then you took up where you leave off and we went through a champagne factory and we drank and never stayed sober for a week. This officer carried a case of champagne with him (laughter).

But at the same time, we picked up a strange thing. You go through active tank battles and stuff, artillery barrages and the air is pungent with odor, you know. Dirty mud smell of I guess dead earth or dead people. The whole areas smells of it and we picked up one guy going back to his outfit. We asked what had happened to him and he said, "Well this is my second trip back". He was an infantry, he got shot, went back and came back, hitched a ride with a medical officer and he says, "I'll go back with you and help you". He came up on the tank battle, he just finished, he jumped off the truck, went up on the first tank and pulled out his own brother. And he went psycho. So we back for treatment and came back with us. I could never imagine anything like that.

And then we went across to the Rhine and I guess we stayed at the Rhine getting ready for about a week because we had to lay line out in the signal corps then. We had to lay nine telephone lines to every outfit that was going to go across. So we'd be on this side of the river, see the old cross on the Rhine, the Germans (laughter). We'd get chased up the hill. There was a huge open area down to where we had to lay line and then they'd chase up the hill with 88's, boom, boom, all over and then our artillery would answer them and then change back and forth. 

So the night before we were supposed to go across, oh just before that, a couple nights before that, we were down at the river, turned around the corner fast and here we came up underneath a tiger tank so we very carefully backed our jeep out of there. This thing looked huge. The night before we had a lieutenant come over and said, "Could you row over tonight with a line and a phone so that when we get across, I'll have my own phone over there?" He didn't get, he did not get his phone (laughter).

INTERVIEWER: He wanted you to row across the Rhine River?

HOLMES: So he could have his own phone.

INTERVIEWER: A swift moving river like that.

HOLMES: Yeah, with the Germans over there. So the next morning, barrages all over, aircraft, that's the thing about aircraft. Boy when they get to ground, they leave a hole. You know they come in strapping, don't come out of it, big holes in the ground. After the rain, just drift up in the air and then floated down backwards like this and all the crew were jumping out and the pilot was the last one to go out and he landed in the field right next to us, plop, just like the cartoons. His body figure impressed about four feet into the ground. They hit that hard.

So the engineers got about halfway across the Rhine and the 88's just blew them right out of the water. They had to get another and finally came upon the pontoon bridges and by then the Germans had retreated quite a bit so we're going down the Rhine and you look up, on the top, here's the guys up there in the vineyards working away, like watching a movie. All the little islands had their castles on them. It was very picturesque except that after we came down, we turned left and went past - where was it - Frankfurt and that was another thing.

Frankfurt's battle went around a big curve and there must have been 30 tanks in there burning so we plowed up through the village so fast, I don't remember it. I remember a brick street.

INTERVIEWER: The tanks that were burning, were they American tanks?

HOLMES: I never saw an American GI dead, see Germans all over covered in dirt and dust on the roads. Never saw an American. They took them out that fast. So then just past that, we went to a little village called Gotha and our commander made the whole village go out and look at this concentration camp that we freed. That was what I was telling you about.

You could smell it a mile away, like I guess compared to the hog farms here. It was terrible and they knew nothing. We were good Germans, nix Nazis, you know. A lot of them. There was a barracks when you came through the gate, oh to get through the gate, there was this guy there that the prisoners had captured and had stomped to death. For some reason, they captured this one guy and they just, their anger, he was just flat, stomped, and they told the young kids, they're about 11, 12, the Americans are coming, you're free.

They ran out of the barracks into a machine gun. There was a whole pile, about six feet tall of young kids. All shot and thrown over. Then you go through the barracks and you see all these poor old dead people just laying there and then in the back, about three buildings, probably the size of a tobacco barn I would say and the doors were open and you're looking floor to ceiling, nude bodies, shaved heads with everyone had a number across, some kind of an experiment I guess. The sense that anybody could do this to a human, let alone the multitude of them, so I didn't even go look at the rest of the...I had to get out of there.

And then we belted our way across to the Czech border to a place called Zwickau, I remember that, I don't know why, and we freed another labor camp where factories where they had these young kids, again 10, 11, 12 years old, all from the Balkan area, Albania, Greece, Italy, working in these factories over there. They had no recollection of their name, where they were from. What do you do with these displaced people? They just were here, you know, they grew up in this factory. They had no idea where to go back to.

And then we sat there on the border for two weeks waiting for the Russians to come over. I never saw anybody. One fella said he'd gone down to...one man was carrying a bucket. He thought it was water, it was vodka (laughter). He almost gagged on it. Oh, the other thing I was telling you about, before we cross the Rhine, we captured this little group. They were dressed in bright Kelly green uniforms. The officers wore caps with feathers on them. The wagon carrying their supplies and stuff had two women sitting on it, part of their cooks. The Germans had placed them here and said, "Here, do something" and they had no idea what to do. It was like the operettas, is that what they call them.

INTERVIEWER: They were armed?

HOLMES: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: But there was no resistance?

HOLMES: They just sat there. We captured them.

INTERVIEWER: They were practicing to give up.

HOLMES: Yeah, that was the weird thing too to me. The major and I had thrust through and gone down through to the Balkans again, Austria and all that. We captured the whole group in Zwickau, old men and young kids about 10 that had been given rifles and said, "Here, protect the town". No training, no nothing, just...so we captured them.

INTERVIEWER: Did the older men and the kids, did they put up any resistance?

HOLMES: Nothing. They just took them. They had no leadership, no, I guess, purpose, I don't know. So then at the end of the war, they started chasing back down through Austria, the Germans, and my commander said we have an offering for in-service rehabilitation to go back to the States or to art school in England for one semester. Would you like it? So I said yes sir. So I went and I had no idea how I got back. This was going back to Rouen. Our outfit, most of it went back, to deportation camps because by then, they were just chasing splinter groups. So the main army would come back through Rouen. Yes, I'd love to go to England.

INTERVIEWER: Had you had a background in art?

HOLMES: Yeah, I had two art scholarships before that.

INTERVIEWER: Here in the United States?

HOLMES: Before I went in, yeah. So I took it. And there were engineering people going into architecture, a lot of courses. At the end of the semester, the major in charge said, "So long" and he left. So what do we do. So we went over to Southampton and said we're lost prisoners or something. Okay, he signed us in. I was sent to be a driver for the provost marshall up in London and go down to Scotland Yard. I had three cars of my own. It was great.

There's funny things, I guess they're funny - we captured a town and it was the coldest, it was so cold, they slept us up on an old SS barracks with no walls. The walls had been blown out previously. Slept on a cold slab floor. The second lieutenant came up, we were on the second floor and said, "You'll have to be quiet". Somebody found some beer or something. The people in town were complaining about the noise so they said well you can tell blankety-blank what the Germans can do. We never saw them again.

The complete devastation of towns and villages, we had our tank commander, he sent them through town, one tank this way and one this way and rode through and put a shell in every building in the town. We said, "What's good that do?" You get a hole in front of the building, then you go in and look for an explosion and it takes the rest of the building out. So all there was was the street with all these faces on the buildings off.

INTERVIEWER: Where were the people? The villagers.

HOLMES: Oh, they'd leave. They'd go out and sit in the fields somewhere and then they'd come back in after, but we'd throw people out. I remember one story, the tank commander sent the half tracks in to get fuel for the tanks and at a depot this second lieutenant again said "Oh do you have four #6642" or something. You can't get it otherwise. They said sure, ordered his half tracks up to the fence, chained it, pulled the fence out, filled it up with ammo and gas, wrote him a thing and said "Here's your form" as he left. Can you imagine? In the middle of a battle, he's ....

Probably the worst fear I ever had of being killed was in the Black Forest and now I know why they call it that. You drive in in the daytime and it's so tall and tree covered on the top, the canopy, it's like night. It is so dark in there and everything coming towards us had the windshields shattered with machine gun bullet holes. So you're constantly ducking this way and that way, but Patton, for some reason, we never ran out of ammo, material, food or anything. Except we didn't understand, we were about four days, you know, no sleep, no nothing, getting ready to cross the Rhine, battling across, we can walk from about 4:00 in the morning to get something to eat and the cook said, "Well, you'll have to wait for the POW's to taste their breakfast first". We didn't wait.

I guess, to me, the greatest sense of war is looking at the devastation and the quality, you know, as an artist, you're trying to uplift the structure a little, to see it destroyed with no sense of who you're killing. They were probably the same as we were. Some of those outfits were depleted like they had very young untrained soldiers in them. Like that Midsummer's Night Dream Austrian outfit, that was, it was almost like a fantasy and you never saw, well at least I didn't, anything happening except the war. 

Except that one instance I saw the guys up tending their vineyards on the Rhine. Otherwise there was no activity, no trucks on the road, no nothing. Just the army chasing army, you know. But the destruction - one night we went out and if you ever heard of a company of 190's, the real long artillery pieces. There were two companies of them in the back of the hedgerow and they fired all at once, every gun. It lifted our jeep right off the ground. 

So we followed where they were firing. The Germans were firing back over us and through this village we went through, there was nothing left when we came back from laying line. Totally destroyed. All the beautiful buildings, cathedrals gone. So you sense that mankind is capable of destroying itself and with this new stuff coming in, we're quite capable. We were talking the other night and everything they talked about was war - the Roman wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, this one and that one, that's all we've been doing.

When you think of the man hours and material which could have elevated mankind to some level of understanding and you feel --- at least you felt that you did contribute a small part I guess of the war, the good this has done, now it's starting all over again. We're sitting in the library full of mankind's total concepts and everything supposedly. So what have they learned? 

Like I heard a general the other day was talking about they would develop a clean kill machine - what is that supposed to mean, that you can forgive him for doing it. I don't know. You can't pass it on to anybody. I volunteered for the battleship over here and they were giving a lecture on how this musician had put down in composition the sense of war. I always raised my hand. I said, "Excuse me, no word, visual display, musical composition, could give you the total sense of smell and destruction. No way." 

To me the total sense of, how could you put it, the children, generations have their towns, villages, parents, brothers, destroyed and then you go through a concentration camp that was pretty small - and you read about the big ones, millions of people? And you got people today still say it was a propaganda ploy to build up the morale so we could go kill others. 

Put a flag in your hand. I have a funny sense about the unity that they're tying to the flag, the symbol of...I can't conceive...well see...I'm talking about somebody who went through destruction and tried to build something that wants to be destroyed again, towards a goal that nobody's defined. Nobody asked what are your goals in life. This university here full of diversity, but the students are not asked what they want. Some of them will develop antiwar factions and stuff, but the funny thing is I had a teacher at the end of the war and during the Vietnamese war when they had the peace sit-ins, I actually had a teacher, a social studies teacher, who should know you don't gain much by destroying because you have to spend so much time rebuilding.

He said well the first one that would sit down in our main lobby of the high school, the first one that sat down for peace, I'd go down and shoot them. That's the...there's a flag-waving element there that I don't like.

INTERVIEWER: But if called upon and you were in reasonably good health and called upon, would you go back? Would you go back into the military if called upon and your health was pretty good?

HOLMES: Would I go back in? No. Because I'm not thought of as a human, I'm thought of as a faction that they could say we've got 8000 of these people put together, don't know what they're doing and no recourse as to decision making, just pushed and not even told why you're out there and you look around and here's four or five that are gone. Where did they go? What's that song? About John.

INTERVIEWER: Where did all the flowers go?

HOLMES: That's a beautiful sense of you're not killing an idea, you're killing the person who carries the idea who in many cases are trying to better mankind and mankind says "wait a minute, we're still fighting" to find out a definition for mankind really. I mean who are you going to ask. You're going to ask this madman over there. But the quiet sense like in this room after a battle is funny too. Everything is quiet after a battle goes through.

INTERVIEWER: Graveyard quiet.

HOLMES: Yeah. It's true. So did you win and what did you win? If you won the right for the people in this university to govern their own self, you can't because they're in a situation that is controlled by how you get a degree. You must go through this tube of, what would you call it, a tunnel, everybody goes through it and then comes out the other end.

INTERVIEWER: It's called control.

HOLMES: Is that it? And is the control the consensus of the general populace because you cannot define the general populace. In a small place like Wilmington, nobody really understands what World War II was. You ask a high school student, it's almost...the Roman Empire I guess.

When mankind finds an idea, who does he tell it to that has the same intelligence and background to use it well. Most of the people in Wilmington do not want to bothered with politics, correct? So it's the same thing to me, you asked about would I go back in. I'd say no, there must be better ways, correct?

INTERVIEWER: Have we found a better way?

HOLMES: Nope.

INTERVIEWER: Are we searching for the better way?

HOLMES: We have faster means of delivering it, right? Deliver the first blow (laughter). I still say, who defines what freedom is because you cannot contain it. I had a professor that would say, anytime you say something like that, you have to build fences around it to contain it. It's impossible to have a group without all these group wars. If not, you're not them, so they keep building these fences more and more and more. 

I'm doing some new work now for a show and I'm more social conscious with it and people say that's a morbid way of looking at it, society, by pointing out its faults because we're not supposed to have any faults, but we have as much, maybe not the same degree as other countries, but it's still all maintained by a very small majority of people who tell other people to control the general populace.

INTERVIEWER: Were these the types of thoughts that you had when you were a 19, 20 year old in the military?

HOLMES: That's what I learned fast. Going through and seeing where it leaves man, to me...

INTERVIEWER: Did other people have this perception, other people known to you, have the same quizzical attitude toward life or were you the only one?

HOLMES: No, most of the majority were followers. Turn left, right, left, right, don't think. There has to be...the experience of it is so strong. In the middle of it, we got battle stars for Mozel campaign and what does it mean? My grandchildren say, oh yeah. It certainly doesn't mean very much to all the young guys that I knew who went over and never came back. They're stuck in the ground with a cross holding them down in Europe. When you see those battlefield cemeteries and they're not people, they're numbers now.

INTERVIEWER: When you were discharged, did you find or where did you find other people with whom you could communicate as you are now? Did you go back to school, what did you do?

HOLMES: I went to school partially to find a peace of mind probably, to put your thoughts into a cultural learning as learning how to destroy and of course, when you don't know who you're killing so it doesn't matter, you know. It doesn't matter who you're killing, you're killing an enemy. They give it a name. Like I said there was no prejudice except the name so you don't hate the person. You hate prejudice, the area or group in which they're in. 

I don't hate you because you work for the university and my son can't afford to come in, you know, because of ... it doesn't matter the reason, but somebody says here, we only admit so many so they do standards, but they don't measure the standards of the student who may have a brain, but no background for it. No way of helping him or pushing him. I find that when I was doing a lot of artwork, that you cannot have a student who's different than somebody else. All artists paint little still life and portraits, don't give them a chance to explore new directions. 

So that's what I found in ... especially as we got over near the Czech border. The Germans were going so fast that the destruction eased off. Had a very funny feeling, as I said, when we first went into Germany, they were destroying everything and we got across the Rhine and they were going so fast, we were 120 miles out in front of the rest of the Army. Patton was moving that fast. Then I noticed the destruction eased off. So did the destruction of our troops and equipment. And you can't ask the people, aren't you glad we ended the war for you (laughter) cause we found so many, niz Nazis, these are good Germans, that you let a concentration camp grow in your own backyard.

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Holmes, look right into the camera.

HOLMES: Yes sir.

INTERVIEWER: You're now going to talk to your great grandchildren.

HOLMES: My great grandchildren.

INTERVIEWER: That's right. Tell them what it all meant to you and what advice would you give them.

HOLMES: My advice would be for you to ask as many questions as you can. Do not take your parents' prejudiced views with you, they're not yours. Carry on the tradition of family values is wrong cause you tend to diversify friends, business associates, when you are told certain inadequacies about humanity and tie it up as a religion or as a political ploy, group. You must stand up on what you perceive, not what is given to you as material. You can take material and put it together for different conclusions.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you Mr. Holmes.

HOLMES: Is it true?